FOCUS: Terror bursts our bubble

Monday morning, April 15. Patriots Day. A day only celebrated in Massachusetts where the Red Sox play at 11 a.m., thousands participate and watch the Boston Marathon and school is not in session. Studying six courses in my final semester at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, I was getting burned out and neede...

Monday morning, April 15. Patriots Day. A day only celebrated in Massachusetts where the Red Sox play at 11 a.m., thousands participate and watch the Boston Marathon and school is not in session. Studying six courses

in my final semester at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, I was getting burned out and needed some semblance of balance. I decided to spend the day not dwelling on schoolwork, but to enjoy the improving weather and go bird watching.

Returning home later that afternoon, I turned on the TV as I updated my yearly bird list. Instead of catching up on the Sox game, news was breaking all over the networks about an explosion at the Boston Marathon.

For seven hours straight I absorbed the horrific footage and still images of the explosions and victims being carted off to hospitals. Even as this atrocious act happened some 50 miles away, I felt it was far enough where it wouldn’t effect us down here in little old Fall River, where nothing much outside of a traffic accident and a mayoral photo op happens.

We do live in a bubble of some sorts — if you haven’t noticed.

Then came Friday morning.

As I woke up contemplating whether to be on time for typography class, be fashionably late, or not go at all, my girlfriend was online and said something happened last night in Boston. I turned on the TV and quickly snapped out of my mental fog — focusing on the latest news of the shootout confrontation between the two marathon-bombing suspects and local authorities.

Although I was being pulled in to know more of what was going on, I decided to go to school. After all, I had a magazine layout project that was due and I didn’t want to jeopardize my grade being penalized.

Restraining myself from watching the news, I prepared to leave for school. It was then I received a school text alert saying the campus was closed. Thinking that most colleges were closing due to the events happening in Watertown, I went online to find out more.

Information at this point was not streaming, but gushing through the Internet as I discovered that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second surviving bombing suspect (still at large at the time), is a registered student at UMass Dartmouth.

In a split second I turned into photojournalist mode. I grabbed my cameras and other recording devices and headed to campus.

Driving up there I was running through my head, “A student? There? Here?

Had I seen him? Had I bumped into him rushing off to a class?” I couldn’t dwell on that, I had a job to do.

I arrived at the campus with surprising ease and started to photograph cars streaming out of the university, police directing traffic, and students, still in their pajamas, dragging their luggage behind them getting picked up by family or not knowing where to go. It was then I went from being a photojournalist to a concerned student.

Page 2 of 2 -
We all watch time after time terrible events like what happened in Boston, but we never think how close they can get to us in Fall River. Watching those students leave made me think, even though to most of them, I am old enough to be their father, it could be me being forced to leave campus too.

My objectivity as a photojournalist was compromised, but it also helped in illustrating what others weren’t seeing: the substance behind the dynamic.

With this in mind, I began focusing on the students’ reactions. I photographed one student, James Cavanaugh, a criminal justice major, drape an American flag around himself as he stood with classmates watching the student body leave and military and local police speed in.

As I stood documenting the evacuation of UMass Dartmouth, the institution I have attended the last three years, with just a week and a half left before I finish my degree and graduate summa cum laude, a sobering thought surfaced: I learned how close, and how vulnerable, we all are.

For Fall River, I think it is time to examine that culture-created bubble we live in.

Don’t you?

Michael Smith, of Fall River, is a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth student and a correspondent for The Herald News.